1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, a print server and an information processing device. The present invention more specifically relates to a technique of controlling printing process by applying a printing rule to a print job on the print server.
2. Description of the Background Art
For producing a printed output such as a document, a rule which is registered in advance is conventionally applied based on information included in a print job and the printed output is produced in accordance with a result of application of the printing rule. The printing rule defining print settings for each print purpose is registered in advance with a printer. This known technique is introduced for example in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. JP 2006-338237 A. According to this known technique, in response to receiving the print job, the printer specifies the print purpose based on template information included in the received print job. The printer applies the printing rule corresponding to the specified print purpose and configures the print settings such as printing double sided and/or printing multiple pages on a single sheet, thereby producing the printed output. The conventional printing rule applied at printing process is aimed to reduce printing costs by saving the number of the produced printed outputs.
When producing the printed output by applying the printing rule to the print job, the printed output is sometimes produced in a way a user does not intend. It is assumed, for instance, that the conventional printing rule is applied to the print job as described above to automatically configure settings to print double sided and two pages on a single sheet. In this case, even though the user intends to have the printed output with one page of the document to print printed on one side of the whole sheet, the document is forcibly printed double sided and two pages on the single sheet. In such a case, the printed output is not produced in a way the user intends. Therefore, the printed output may be wasted, and a purpose of the printing rule to cut printing costs cannot be achieved.
In order to solve the above-described problems, when receiving the print job, for example, the printer should make the user check by showing the result of applying the printing rule before starting a process proceeded by applying the printing rule to the print job. In this case, the user is allowed to determine whether or not to continue printing after checking the result of applying the printing rule, so this may prevent the printed output from being wasted.
In these days, the printing rules applied to the print jobs have likely to become diversified. It is assumed, for example, the printing rule to print with a high-speed output device if the printed output produced with the print job exceeds a predetermined number of pages may be registered. When such a printing rule is registered, the number of pages of the printed output to be produced needs to be detected by analyzing whole data included in the received print job before determining whether or not to apply the printing rule to the print job.
When the print job has a large size of data, it may require a long time to complete receiving the job. In this case, it also require a long time to analyze the data included in the print job. This may require an extremely long time to show the user who sent the print job the result of applying the printing rule. Therefore, this may make the user wait for the extremely long time to see the result of applying the printing rule. Some users may move to the installation site of the printer and wait to have the printed output after sending the print job without noticing the displayed result of application of the printing rule being displayed because a screen does not change even at a later time. In such a case, even if the user waits for a long time in front of the printer, printing does not start, so the user wastes a time and energy.